It’s a very handy website which generates word clouds from any block of text, identifying individual words and then showing them at a size relative to their frequency (in the fashion of the Topics box on the right of this page).

Since things are a bit quiet these days on the quizzing scene, I’ve come up with a use for wordle.net. After the continue… you’ll find Wordles of 10 famous songs (or their lyrics, to be accurate). See if you can identify them from the words alone.

The 2009Eurovision Song Contest takes place this Saturday evening in Moscow. Or rather the final does. The main event is preceded by two semi-finals, the first of which takes place tonight (Tuesday), with the second semi occuring on Thursday night. After the semis, the field of 42 countries will have been whittled down to the 25 competitors who will take part in ‘the world’s biggest television programme’.

The first Eurovision took place in 1956 and, in the 53 years since, it’s become something of a cult. Nothing else combines culture, popularity and negative street cred as the ESC does. In its time, it’s managed to spawn a Grammy ‘Record of the year‘, a revolution and, perhaps most famously of all, ABBA.

Unsurprisingly, it’s also something of a quizzing gold mine, with venues, hosts, interval acts and gaffs all being viable themes for quiz rounds before one even gets to the acts and their songs.